Digital geography

Where on the internet do you live? And how does that shape your life?

The country we live in can make a big difference over how our lives play out. Per capita income, happiness index, BMI, life expectancy and many other indicators vary significantly by country.

But more and more of your life is lived digitally: you talk to others through texts, you read news on websites and blogs, you follow others on social media, and learn about prominent people on podcasts.

So what does living a digital life mean for how its geography shapes your life?

Is the internet an equal opportunity neighborhood where we all live the exact same life under the exact same influences? Where you create the same outcomes as everybody else no matter your environment?

Or are there different digital geographies that can significantly shape the information, opportunities, and connections you have access to?

The Spanish internet

About 15% of Americans speak Spanish fluently – no matter where in the US they live.

When you speak a different language natively, something interesting happens to your digital content consumption: you tend to consume it in your native language.

Even though translation technology exists, most content on the internet is not language agnostic, especially audio and video: Podcasts in English, in Spanish and in Portuguese are quite different. Different language media approaches different topics, in different ways.

Even if you, reading my article right now, speak a second language: how much of your internet content consumption happens in that second language compared to your first language? My guess is "not much."

Like commuting from the countryside to the city, there's friction to consuming content in a different language. This means that the people you'll interact with digitally will tend to be from "this group" and not "that group," just like the people you tend to hang out with in real life will be the ones from your neighborhood and not from the other city.

Interestingly, the significant challenge of language acquisition means our digital opportunities don't move with us the way the physical opportunities do when we change countries.

You know how 15% of Americans speak Spanish fluently? Another interesting fact is that about 8% of Americans don't speak English fluently.

These Americans moved on the physical geography, but they haven't been able to move on their digital geography.

Like a traveler lacking a visa, the person lacking new language mastery is stuck using a different internet from the one that those around them use.

This means that creating language-agnostic access to content and communication is an excellent way to foster digital inclusion.

But besides language, there's one other digital separation that shapes the internet you use – one much less tangible than the boundaries of a city or the differences in language.

Boundaries defined by personalized algorithms.

Algorithmic geographies

In physical space, if you and I are in the same room, live in the same street, or go to the same mall, things around us will be roughly the same: same people, same houses, same stores.

In some parts of the internet, this proximity between people no longer exists. The internet is tailored for each person, and you can't tell how close, or far, my internet is from yours.

You do a Google search, check Twitter, scroll through Instagram or TikTok, or open YouTube, and you have a unique experience. "I watch YouTube" means different things to different people.

Exactly how different? We don't know.

In fact, while physical distance is measured in miles and kilometers, we don't even know how to measure algorithmic distance. How distant is your Instagram experience from your wife's? From you kids'? In what unit would this distance even be measured?

There is in fact an answer to what is our digital algorithmic distance measured on: Euclidean distance, cosine similarity, and I'm sure a number of more sophisticated mathematical models and algorithms. Platforms like Instagram and YouTube build your digital profile and compare you to others based on the data of your interactions with them.

Did you fully watch that paella cooking video? Did Amy click like on it? Then you're close on that particular data point, you're living close to her on that particular digital geography. Knowing that, the algorithm will now give you something else to watch, moving you to some other digital geography neighborhood, while you're taken along for the ride like furniture in a moving truck.

That's how the incentives work.

In a way, because your attention is worth so much money, it's worth fully customizing your digital geography to capture it. If physical spaces were as meticulously tracked and customizable as digital spaces, the city owner would place all the city stores and restaurants to maximize your consumer spend, just like supermarkets' junk food aisles get placed next to the cashiers.

So in digital spaces, instead of the blunt tool of "you are American," you get the refined tool of big data digital profiles defining through millions of data points who you are and on which digital geography you will live.

With so much of your life lived in digital spaces, your attention becomes its most valuable commodity.

The real estate others are buying isn't land – it's your attention.

Attention is the new real estate

Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.

Munger, Charles T.. Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger (p. 320).

Where I grew up, there was a nice educational, government funded TV channel, but nobody watched it. Instead, most people watched junk TV on other channels.

When YouTube started getting popular, I remember thinking: "Well, at least now quality will improve because people have choice" – but instead, quality decreased; just open the logged out YouTube home page and see for yourself.

The thing about bad TV and bad YouTube (and bad Instagram, TikTok, X) is that we were choosing it all along.

The incentive for TV and other platforms is to capture your attention. Because you spend money and make choices, influencing you carries a lot of power.

In the digital world, your geography will be shaped through the incentives of what most efficiently captures your attention and influences you.

So some of the biggest tech companies today are in the niche of attention capture and influencing, like Google and Meta, and individuals make millions of dollars because they can capture your attention and influence you.

Technically, it's not capturing your attention they care about – it's influencing you. If you and everybody else were immune to influence, there would be no money to be made here. Instead, this ability to influence behavior fuels a multi-trillion dollar digital economy.

So if there were other ways to influence you that were more effective than junk videos and TV, clickbait, strong images, political polarization, that's likely what we'd see.

But it just so happens that the best way to get you to do what they want is to capture your attention.

Moving to the land of (digital) opportunity

Influencing others is not inherently bad. We influence our kids to eat well, our friends to stay in healthy relationships, our colleagues to do good work. We are influenced by our loved ones to not skip gym, to go out in the sun, and to save for a rainy day.

Influence is power, and power will be used according to incentives. It's incentives that can be good or bad for you and others.

Because digital geographies are so flexible and customizable, the first step for ensuring it's benefiting you is to align your incentives with the incentives of those who are influencing you.

What does success look like to you? Being healthy? Spending time with your kids? Having free time? Do those things that benefit you also benefit those who are trying to influence you? Or not?

It's hard to directly control the digital geography where you live.

• Learning new languages is hard.
• Algorithms are opaque, and we don't know how they work.
• Platforms and Influencers are incentivized to capture your attention and influence you, and their goals may not align with yours.

Just like you didn't choose where you were born in your physical geography, and it still significantly shaped who you are, you may be more subject than agent of your digital geography, and it's shaping who you are every day.

So what can you do about it? How can you get away from your current digital geography and move to one that better aligns with what you're looking for?

First: There are no easy answers. Like grabbing your belongings and family and moving to a different country, there are no easy ways to move to a different digital geography. No shortcuts.

1) Learn a new language

Keep thinking about how China is gonna rule the world in the future? How's your Mandarin?

Baffled about how come Russians support the Ukraine invasion? How's your Russian?

Want to expand your business into South America? How's your Spanish and Portuguese?

Care a lot about the Israel and Gaza conflict? How's your Hebrew and Arabic?

In fact, how would my life turn out if I didn't speak English?

Very different.

2) Choose the content you consume

In a world where algorithms decide what we see, the only influence we have on the content we consume is what type of content we've spent the most time engaging with in the past.

In behavioral economics, there's a term called choice architecture, which is a fancy name for manipulating you by crafting how your choices are presented.

Richard Thaler, one of the fathers of behavioral economics, along with prolific author Cass Sunstein, talks about choice architecture on Nudge, illustrating among other things, the strong power of defaults and explicit consent in decreasing organ donations.

As you will now expect, the default mattered — a lot. When participants had to opt in to being an organ donor, only 42 percent did so. But when they had to opt out, 82 percent agreed to be donors. Surprisingly, almost as many people (79 percent) agreed to be donors in the neutral condition.

Thaler, Richard H.; Sunstein, Cass R.. Nudge (p. 180). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

In short: you can lead people to not donate organs even if they intended to by just presuming that they didn't.

Curiously, the fact that most people want to be organ donors surprised even the author because the power of defaults is so strong that, him being in America where consent is required, he assumed a new default would nudge people to donate more and not that the current default was already nudging people to donate less!

The lesson is: you are not, NOT, NOOOT immune to nudges and choice architecture. Nobody is.

I don't know why you, and others, assume you're immune to choice architecture. I really don't. Hence my emphasis before. My apologies. You are not immune. I'm not. Nobody is. Forget it.

OK. Hrm.

So, where was I? Oh right, what to do about it?

Use algorithms for discovery (if you must), but consume content from deliberate sources. Love that podcaster? Subscribe! Love this artist's videos? Check their playlist! Love that cat on Instagram? Follow it!

But don't spend most of your time consuming content you haven't chosen. Don't let algorithms shape your digital life at their whim. Their goals aren't aligned with yours. How could they?

Instead, choose content from people whose interests align with yours.

While explicitly following still means you're being influenced, since algorithms decide what to show you when you're choosing who to follow, you can take back some control by consuming mostly content from creators you chose to follow, instead of those chosen by an algorithm.

Sure, it's much easier to have computers choose what we consume for us.

But I told you this wouldn't be easy.

Understand your digital geography

Your digital geography is like your physical geography: it will influence your life in myriad ways, both easy and hard to perceive. There's no escaping it.

What you must do is choose your digital geography. Like choosing a house with a good school district, an apartment within commuting distance, or a state where laws align with your values, you can and should find ways to control your digital geography to align with your pursuits.

You have the power to shape your digital geography.

Because if you don't shape your digital geography, someone else surely will.